Total Annihilation was one of my first games, and remains, to this day, one of my favorites. It is pure concentrated awesome science fiction joy. Take lots of robots, have them blow each other up, and watch the chaos. Or control them. Those were the best years, before we worried about 3d and whatnot, we had Total Annihilation. The awesomest game ever. I hereby give it my best game ever award (7 @'s). TA:Spring is a project to remake Total Annihilation into true three dimensions, and it includes lots of neat features (and free license content packs, for you who heathens don't own in even one, much less excess of eight copies), such as individual unit control. Try it today.

Or my ARM commander will kick your Core Krogoth's butt across the battlefield with his D-Gun.

Its great that your promoting TA (my favorite game of all time) but saying it isn't "true 3d" because it had a fixed camera is false. TA was one of the first RTSs (possibly the first, but I'm not 100% sure)to be 3d. All units and terrain are in 3d and it affects the game play. TA springs does give the true 3d "experience" by unfixing the camera. I haven't gotten around to trying it yet but TA Springs does look awesome.

On a more positive note, great job giving TA a proper memoriam. If the pres. hasn't declared this a national holiday as you have he should soon! (Awesome Speech!)

I could have sworn it was also. I knew the weapons calculations were 3d and the units collision areas may have been; but what little I looked at modding seemed to suggest the units where graphically represented by sets of sprites, not 3d models.

Mmm... getting warmer... the units were fully 3D, the terrain was "quasi-3D". It's a flat texture put in place to represent a real heightmap... and the heightmap is real 3D, ie, units rock as they go over bumps, shots get blocked, etc.

Since I'm an attention whore I'll point out where you can download Absolute Annihilation v6.0, the final version of my TA mod. It features about 450 units, but unlike unit packs like TAUIP and UTASP, every unit has a unique function, they aren't all just there so the modder can say "I'VE GOT 512 UNITS!!!". The focus is strictly on balance, and AA6 is one of the most-downloaded TA mods ever.

You can get it here:http://downloads.sourceforge.net/ta-aa/AA60.zip?modtime=1127737496&big_mirror=0

The mod is designed strictly for skirmish/multiplayer. It has an enhanced but reasonably fair AI. I've heard the mod works for the Campaign but I can't say since I've never played it with AA... TA's campaign was not the game's selling point.

You can also find the official AA map packs here:http://downloads.sourceforge.net/ta-aa/AAMaps551.zip?modtime=1123408943&big_mirror=0http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=113294&package_id=156287http://downloads.sourceforge.net/ta-aa/NUGGENMAPSv2.zip?modtime=1147295462&big_mirror=0

Mmm... getting warmer... the units were fully 3D, the terrain was "quasi-3D". It's a flat texture put in place to represent a real heightmap... and the heightmap is real 3D, ie, units rock as they go over bumps, shots get blocked, etc.

We're both right.

Height maps are basically just an extension of collision zones/masks. It's just a cheat to give the appearance of 3D.

However, they incorporated the height map into their physics equation so that for all intents and purposes, it played as if it was 3D.

So, from an animation/rendering/engineering standpoint (where I am coming from), the terrain is not 3D.

From a game perspective, you can achieve most "3d terrain benefits" by simply using a height map. Thus, in that case, it could be considered as 3D.